Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes to Sea
Read Harry the Poisonous Centipede Goes to Sea Online
Authors: Lynne Reid Banks
Lynne Reid Banks
For Paloma and David
9. George’s Even Bigger Mistake.
16. The middle of the dark-time
Harry and George were lying in the moonlight. They’d gone up to the no-top world as soon as it got dark – looking for an adventure, George had said, but there didn’t seem to be one. Harry had his suspicions that George wasn’t so much looking for adventure as for Something Else.
These aren’t people we’re talking about. They’re centipedes. And not those little wiggly wire-worms you dig up in your garden, either. These are giant
tropical centipedes, and they are POISONOUS. They have pincers on their heads to defend themselves with, and also – I have to be perfectly frank – to kill things with, by biting them and paralysing them with their poison.
Terrible, you think? Cruel? Oh, please. This is the Natural World. Not many creatures in nature get by without eating some other creature, and that includes most Hoo-Mins.
What’s a Hoo-Min?
Well, you’re going to have to do a bit of guessing in this story anyhow, so you can start with Hoo-Mins. If you reckon giant poisonous centipedes are scary, it may surprise you to know they’re much more scared of us.
Us Hoo-Mins.
Get it? Right. We’re the Hoo-Mins. That’s your first puzzle solved.
Hoo-Mins, or rather H-Mns, is Centipedish, the language of centipedes.
They mainly use signals, but they can crackle very faintly to each other, and when they do there are no vowel sounds. So you must realise at once that their real names couldn’t be Harry and George. That’s just what I call them. Their real, Centipedish names were Hxzltl and Grnddjl.
Go on. Try to say them. Try to say your
own
name without the a’s, e’s, i’s, o’s and u’s (I’ll let you keep the y’s) and you’ll be talking Centipedish.
I must just add that of course centipedes don’t have words for a lot of things that they don’t know much about, so they’ve become very good at inventing ways to describe them. You’ll find a lot of these centi-descriptions in this story. I’m sure you’ll be able to work them out, but I’ll just give you a couple of examples. (Don’t worry – the story’s going to start at any minute!)
Hoo-Mins are the enemies of centipedes. But they have others. There are also hairy-biters (which is anything hairy that bites), flying-swoopers (birds, of course, plus maybe bats) and belly-crawlers. No prizes for guessing that one—it’s snakes, of course.
But Hoo-Mins are in a category all by themselves. The category of the fastest, biggest and scariest things around.
Harry and George lived underground in earth-tunnels, which are nice and damp
(it’s very important to centipedes not to Dry Out) and came up at night to hunt. You’ll soon find out that their favourite foods were
not
things that you’d fancy.
When they were younger, they were centis, which is child-centipedes. But now they were centeens, about eighteen centimetres long – nearly as big as Belinda. Belinda was Harry’s mother and George’s adopted mother.
Her
Centipedish name – are you ready for this? – was Bkvlbbchk.
Belinda was getting quite old now, though she could still give a toad or a beetle a run for its money – it was just the very fast things like lizards and mice she had trouble with. So Harry and George did some of her hunting for her. They’d had lots of cuticle-rippling adventures and feeler-close escapes, but they always managed to get back home in the end. So she’d decided to stop poison-claw-clicking, which is how mother centipedes nag, and let them have their freedom.
“Just take care,” she would beg, as they headed out of their home tunnels up into the dark-time.
“We’ll be all right, Mama,” Harry would say as he chased after George, who still usually led the way. “We’ll bring you back something delicious for end-of-dark-time meal!”
So, on this night (night – dark-time – OK?), they’d done some hunting and had a tasty heap of goodies beside them. These included a couple of slugs, three assorted caterpillars, one large rhinoceros beetle, which had put up quite a fight but they’d overpowered it in the end, and a mouse. This was their big prize because they knew Belinda loved a tasty bit of mouse before she went to sleep for the bright-time. All right, I’ll help you out this time – the day.
“Mama will be really pleased with us,” Harry said contentedly as they lay there resting, feeling the pale, un-hot light of White Ball shining down on them. It wasn’t a full ball tonight, or they would have scuttled underground to escape it – they didn’t like too much light, being night-creatures.
“Apart from the beetle, though,” mused George, “we can’t say any of it was very exciting.” He didn’t seem to be enjoying the rest. Half his twenty-one segments were off the ground and he was waving his feelers around in all directions.
“Why don’t you relax, Grndd?” asked Harry rather peevishly. “We’ve got enough food. Do you want a snack?”
“No,” said George.
“So what are you questing around for?”
George didn’t answer. He dropped to his forty-two feet and took off without another crackle.
Harry was feeling rather lazy after his night’s hunting and for once he didn’t follow. He pretty well guessed what George had gone after. It wasn’t food. He’d sensed the Something Else. The Something Else was a centeena.
Yes, George was into girls. Girl-centipedes, that is. Only Harry didn’t feel quite ready for all that yet. So he gave a centipedish sigh, laid his head on the good, warm earth, and waited.
Harry loved the no-top-world. It was so full of interesting smells and sounds. Of course he knew it could be dangerous. Apart from Hoo-Mins, which didn’t usually hunt at night, there were all those flying-swoopers and hairy-biters and belly-crawlers that I told you about to watch out for.
But then there was danger everywhere. When he was a young centi, Hoo-Mins
had pushed a cloud of white-choke down into the centipedes’ tunnels and nearly killed all the little creatures that lived in them. There was always the fear that water would flood down and drown them when the Big Dropping Damp came, or that a thinner than usual belly-crawler would creep down in the bright-time and grab them as they lay asleep under their leaves.
There were hairy-biters that could dig, too. Belinda told stories about another nest she’d lived in, which had been dug up by a big ugly hairy-biter. It simply wrecked the whole beautiful maze of tunnels that the centipedes and other tunnel-dwellers had carefully burrowed, and ate everything that hadn’t run away fast enough.
Yes, it was a dangerous world, even for a big, strong, poisonous centeen like Harry.
Still, it was a good world, too, when nothing was going wrong. And nothing
was going wrong tonight. It couldn’t have been more peaceful.
Harry waited for George until he got fed up, and then he decided to start shifting their prey down the tunnels to where Belinda was waiting. George could bring more when he got back.
Harry was just trying to decide whether he could get the mouse down the hole whole, or if he should do it a leg at a time, when he sensed George’s signal.
“Hx! Come quick, I’ve found something!”
When Harry heard George’s signal he forgot all about being tired. He raced off, leaving the pile of prey unguarded. It probably wouldn’t have been there when they got back.
Only they didn’t get back.
He found George standing on his rear legs examining the sides of a straight-up-hard-thing. It was something Harry didn’t like the look of – some kind of trap.
“Grndd! Come away from that – it looks like a can’t-get-out!” crackled
Harry, always the cautious one.
“No, it’s not! Look, there are long openings. You can easily get in
and
out of it. And look what’s inside!”
Harry stood tall beside George and stuck his head in through one of the long holes. The straight-up-hard-thing was full of tree-droppings.
Harry, like nearly all centipedes, was a meat-eater. He’d never eaten the stuff that fell down from trees. So all those yellow-curves didn’t interest him. But there was some kind of meat in there too. He could smell it. Spiders, he thought.
Harry dropped on to all-forty-twos again.
“We’ve got enough, Grndd,” he said reasonably. “I don’t feel like hunting any more.”
George gave him a look of scorn.
“Oh, come on, Hx! It’s those big furry juicy ones. Just
one
! They’re my favourites!”
Harry was remembering that Belinda loved tarantula, especially the heads. She was really too old to catch them for herself any more.
“Oh – all right then,” said Harry. And he followed George through one of the long holes, which, in case you haven’t guessed, were actually gaps in a crate of bananas.
They followed the tarantula smell – unmistakable – into the bottom of the
crate. The great spider was asleep, but it woke up with a jump as it felt them coming. It scurried on its hairy legs under a curved bunch of bananas, but George raced round to the other side of the banana-tunnel. They homed in on it from each side and stopped it before it was even properly awake. ‘Stopped’ means ‘killed’ in Centipedish – they don’t like saying ‘killed’ because it sounds too nasty.
“I must say, it smells wonderful,” said Harry. “What do you think, could we just have a nibble?” He was feeling suddenly starving after all their exertions.
“We’ll have to,” said practical George. “It’s too big to squeeze it out through those long holes unless we chew a bit off its big fat abdomen.”
“Don’t touch the head, though. We must save that for Mama.”
Well, before long the head was all that was left. And George was looking pretty hungrily at that, but Harry drew the line and said, with a centi-burp, “We’ve had enough, Grndd. Come on, we must go home now or big-yellow-ball will be coming back and then we might Dry Out.”
I ought to stress that, short of something
getting
them, Drying Out is the worst thing that can happen to centipedes. The rims of the breathing-holes along their backs have to stay damp or they can’t breathe, so they’re naturally very careful. In fact, if you’re a centipede, saying you’re ‘Dried-Out’ is like saying you’re done for.
They went up through the layers of bananas to the first long hole and tried to climb through it. But they were so full of tarantula that they found it was going to be a very tight squeeze indeed. Especially for Harry, who held the tarantula’s head in his poison-claw.
“We shouldn’t have eaten so much,” said Harry.
“I just couldn’t seem to stop,” said George. “H’m. Well. I suppose we’d better just curl up and have a nap till our meal has gone through and we’re thin again.”
So that’s what they did. They found a comfortable place among the bananas
and fell asleep, curled up together with the head in between them, so no one could take it away.
If they’d only known it, that was the least of their worries.
They did a bit more than take a nap.
Many poisonous creatures can eat each other and not get poisoned themselves, but perhaps in this case some of the tarantula’s poison got into them, just enough to make them really sleepy. Because otherwise it’s hard to explain how they didn’t wake up when day came and the crate of bananas they were in was picked up by a forklift, loaded on to a big transporter and carried far from the banana plantation it had been in – far
from their home-tunnel – far from Belinda. By the time they woke up, if they’d run their fastest for a week of nights, they couldn’t have found their way home.
Well. George had wanted an adventure. But this was going to be a lot more than even he had bargained for.
“Grndd!”
Harry woke up first. The straight-up-hard-thing was moving. It was jiggling. The curved ‘hands’ of bananas were jiggling too, and all the small creatures hiding among them, including Harry and George, were being shaken around.
Some had been dislodged from their hiding or sleeping places amid the fruit, and had fallen to the bottom of the crate, where the centeens could hear them scuttling about anxiously. Harry, especially, was good at understanding other species’ signals. Now he thought, “There’s a lot of fear in here!”
“What’s happening?” asked George in alarm.
“I don’t know. We’re moving.”
With one accord, the two centeens scurried to the nearest long hole, the one they’d tried to squeeze out of before they fell asleep. They put their heads out. Their weak little eye-clusters could just make out bright light (which they hated) and lots of colours and patterns moving past them.
“Where are we? We’re not where we were last night!” crackled George.
“I told you! This is a can’t-get-out! I said we shouldn’t come in here!”
“It’s not a can’t-get-out, Hx. We can get out any time we like.”
“So what’s stopping us?”
They stood side by side on a banana, trying to get their bearings. They were far from the ground – that was obvious. They could see it racing past underneath them. “It’s a long way down,” said George.
“If we leave here we’ll Dry Out,” said Harry. Big-Yellow-Ball was shining hotly. They could feel the heat in the air and see the brightness outside the crate. The heat where they lived was a very damp kind of heat. They sensed they’d be all right as long as they stayed in the moist darkness inside the crate.
“We’d better wait till the moving stops,” said Harry. “And see what it’s like then.”
Meanwhile they tried to behave as if
everything was all right, even though they both knew it wasn’t. They went back to their curved nest of bananas. Harry noticed something at once.
“Where’s Mama’s head?”
“Her what?” asked George blankly.
“The tarantula head we saved for her! It’s gone,” said Harry.
“Maybe it’s just rolled away somewhere.”
“No. I wedged it in tightly between these yellow-curves,” Harry said. “Someone must have stolen it!”
They began to quest around them. George suddenly froze.
“Hx, there’s one of us somewhere in here!”
Harry got it too, now. A decidedly pleasant aroma, amid all the whiffs of other, alien creatures like flies, beetles and spiders. Another centipede, certainly, but – different. Different from him, different from George.
“It’s my centeena!” crackled George softly.
“ Your centeena?”
“Well…er…no, not exactly. I mean…I was chasing her – last night – I hadn’t really caught up with her. I was looking for her, you know, following her scent, when I found the straight-up-hard-thing with the tarantula inside.”
“She must’ve got in before us. She’s here with us.”
“Right!” said George eagerly. “Let’s find her!”
It wasn’t hard. Although the crate was big and there were lots of bananas filling most of it, there were plenty of little spaces and chinks where small creatures could hide. As the two centeens searched, they realised that, whatever else might happen, they weren’t going to be short of a bite to eat.
They sent out inviting signals, and after a while a little female head poked out from between two big bunches of bananas.
“Hallo,” she signalled shyly. “Did you call?” Of course they hadn’t
called.
Centipedes can’t
call.
That’s just my way of putting it.
Harry watched her creep out until she was in full smell. George immediately went up to her and touched feelers with her, and ran all around her once in greeting.
“I’m Grndd and this is Hx,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Jgnblm,” she said. All right, no, I’m not proposing to go on trying to write that or expecting you to say it, though I should add that both the centeens thought Jgnblm was a most euphonious name, which means that to them it had a sweet sound.
Let’s see, then. What about Josie?
“What are you doing here?” Harry asked, touching feelers with her very shyly. He’d never touched feelers with a centeena before, except Belinda of course. It felt very nice.
“He was chasing me,” she said, meaning George. “So I just ducked in through one of those long holes to hide.”
“Why didn’t you get out again before it started to move?”
“I don’t know. I think I just liked it in here. I like yellow-curves,” she added, indicating the banana she was standing on.
“You like standing on them?” asked Harry.
“Eating them,” she said.
“You
eat
tree-droppings?” asked George incredulously.
“Yes.”
“I notice you like tarantula heads, too,” remarked Harry bitterly.
Josie looked puzzled. “What do you mean, tarantula heads?”
“Well, didn’t you take one from just here?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t like eating things that have been alive, it makes me feel a bit sick, so I eat lots of different tree-droppings.”
“Wait a minute. You don’t mean you
never
eat ordinary things?”
“No. Just tree-droppings,” she said demurely.
There was a silence.
“Hx, she’s a no-meat-feeder,” crackled George under his breath.
A centipede that didn’t like meat and wouldn’t
stop
anything! They waved their feelers at Josie as if she were not completely centipede.
“Please don’t feeler me like that,” she said. “It’s rather rude.”
“Oh! Sorry,” said George at once. “It’s just – I’ve never met a no-meat-feeder before. What kind of – er – tree-droppings do you like best? I’ve never really bothered to try any.”
“There are so many different kinds!” Josie said eagerly. “One never gets to the end of them!”
“Weird,” crackled George. Harry nudged him with a bump of his middle section.
“I don’t think it’s weird,” said Harry. “It’s interesting. At least you won’t be hungry in here with all these yellow-curves. I wish I liked them.”
“Try one,” said Josie.
To oblige her, Harry bent his head and took a bite.
“Ugh!” he said. “It’s horrible!”
Josie gave a centipedish laugh by shaking all her segments up and down. “No, no, not the outside! You have to get through to the soft, sweet stuff inside.” She caught a ridge of the yellow skin between her poison-claws and neatly stripped it back. “Now try again,” she said.
George backed away. But Harry nibbled a little of the soft white stuff, and then a little more. “H’m. It’s not bad, I must say. Soft as worms. But not a bit like them to taste.”
Josie shuddered daintily. “I couldn’t bear to eat a worm!” she said.
Before any more could be crackled, the jiggling movement stopped. The three of them dashed along a bridge of bananas
to the long opening again and stuck their heads out.
“Smell that, Grndd! You know what that is, don’t you?” Harry said in shocked tones.
“Yeah, I’m afraid I do,” said George. “It’s the no-end puddle.”
“The no-end puddle? What’s that?” asked Josie.
“It’s water,” said Harry. “Water and water and water, more than you’d ever think there could be. It goes on and on for ever – that’s why it’s called no-end. It’s not even water you can drink, either.”
“Can you swim?” George asked Josie abruptly.
“Swim? You mean, like marine centipedes do?”
“Except they don’t,” said George. “But I can, and so can Harry, and if by any horrible chance we’re going to get dropped in the no-end puddle, like we once were, you’re going to have to learn to swim very fast indeed.”
Poor Josie crouched down on her banana and put out signals of fear. “I can’t, I know I can’t!” she waickled (you
know – a wailing crackle.) “If I’m dropped in the no-end puddle, I’ll stop!”
Both the centeens rushed to her side.
“No, you won’t,” they both said. “You won’t, because we’re here, and we’ll look after you!” And then they looked at each other across her cuticle, and their feelers stuck up straight, which meant, “Why are
you
crackling that to her?
I’m
crackling that to her!”
Oh, dear. Centeenas. They can cause trouble even when they don’t mean to. It’s not their fault, of course.
And just in case you were wondering what did happen to the head, since Josie hadn’t eaten it…Well, I’m sorry to tell you that
another tarantula
had sneaked up through the bananas, and grabbed it. Not very nice, tarantulas.
In fact, the word ‘cannibal’ comes to mind.